No consent banner for the analytics
FollowStats sets no cookies and stores no persistent identifier, so the analytics component does not itself trigger a consent requirement in most setups.
Privacy-first website analytics
A Google Analytics alternative you can explain to your legal team.
GA4 is powerful and free at the point of use. The cost shows up elsewhere: consent banners, data shared with an advertising platform, and a reporting interface most teams never fully learn.
Start with freeHow the two compare
Your data is not an advertising input
Analytics stays in your workspace. It is not shared with an ad platform and is not used to build audience profiles.
Reports you can read in a minute
Traffic, sources, pages, countries, devices, events and revenue. No exploration builder to configure before you learn anything.
Simpler installation
One script tag and a site key. No tag manager, no data streams, no separate configuration property.
Honest limits
GA4 goes far deeper on audience modelling, ad attribution and BigQuery export. If those are central to your work, GA4 remains the right tool.
Common questions
Do I need a cookie banner with FollowStats?
By default FollowStats sets no cookies and stores no persistent cross-site identifier, so a consent banner is not required for the analytics itself in most setups. Your own obligations still depend on everything else your site loads and on your local regulator, so confirm the whole picture rather than this one component.
Is FollowStats GDPR compliant?
FollowStats is built to keep you inside GDPR: cookieless measurement, a short-lived salted visitor hash instead of a stable identifier, coarse location from IP rather than the IP itself in reports, and no advertising profiles. Compliance is a property of your whole deployment, not of one tool, so document your own lawful basis and retention.
What happens to my data?
Analytics data belongs to your workspace. It is encrypted in transit and at rest, retained for the period shown in your plan, never sold and never used to build advertising profiles. You can export or request deletion of account data at any time.
Can I self-host or use my own domain?
FollowStats can be deployed behind your own domains and infrastructure, which also makes measurement more resilient to blocking than a shared third-party endpoint. Contact us with your setup and we will confirm what is involved.
How is this different from Google Analytics?
FollowStats measures without cookies and without building advertising profiles, so there is no consent banner requirement for the analytics itself and no data sharing with an ad platform. The reports are deliberately smaller: traffic, sources, pages, geography, events and revenue, rather than a configuration surface most teams never finish.